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This Workshop provides an opportunity for prospective participants to elaborate on a variety of theoretical and methodological questions concerning the character and study of practice, social realities, knowledge, and learning in the context of organizations.

About the Workshop The Organization Studies Summer Workshop is an annual activity, launched in June 2005, to facilitate high-quality scholarship in organization studies. Its primary aim is to advance cutting-edge research on important topics in the field by bringing together in a Greek island, in early summer, a small and competitively selected group of scholars, who will have the opportunity to interact and share insights in a stimulating and scenic environment.

Following on the tremendous success of the First Organization Studies Workshop in Santorini, we are happy to announce that the Second Workshop will take place at Saint John Hotel (http://www.saintjohn.gr), Mykonos, on 15 & 16 June 2006. Mykonos (http://www.mykonosgreece.com/, http://www.mykonos.net), a world-famous resort with beautiful sandy beaches, unrivalled landscapes and unique Cycladic architecture, not to mention its internationally known night life, will provide an ideal setting for Workshop participants to relax and engage in authentic dialogue. With this Workshop we aim to create a setting in which the juices of intellectual creativity will naturally flow.

Because the aim of the workshop is to generate opportunities for creative interaction and intelligent conversation, the number of participants will be kept intentionally small - up to 50 papers will be accepted. Papers will be circulated in advance and participants will be urged to read them prior to the workshop. More about the practicalities and costs of the workshop will appear in subsequent issues of Organization Studies as well as in the journal's web site (www.egosnet.org/os).

About the Topic We are currently witnessing a renewed interest in 'practice' in several social science areas, among them organizational and management studies, science and technology studies, professional/workplace discourse studies, and sociological theorizing about the character of society and human action. For example, in the strategy-as-practice subfield within organizational studies, we see a growing interest in what particular organizational members actually do to realize strategic practices. A practice-based approach has also been central for understanding organizational knowing and learning among scholars who see these as collective activities. In philosophy, practice has emerged as an important element in such otherwise different philosophical approaches as phenomenology, pragmatism, and Wittgensteinian philosophy developed from the tradition of analytic philosophy. These various areas of renewed interest provide grounds to consider and explore - as a recent collection of essays suggests - the 'practice turn' in social theory inspired by various philosophical and social theoretical traditions and resources, among them phenomenology and hermeneutics, ethnomethodology, activity theory, actor network theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus. Given this intellectual lineage, it seems appropriate to speak of a 're-turn to practice.'

Various theoretical traditions inform empirical studies of practice and the many aspects of what people do. These include Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and the pragmatism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, among others, both of which naturalize Hegel's concepts of consciousness, work, and tool. Both approaches concern changes in practices, their mediation through artifacts (a focus shared with hermeneutics), and cultural retooling in reconstructing the environment and in organizational change. Both also propose interventionist and experimentalist approaches to studies of human practices. Other theoretical traditions have examined the fundamental basis for human interaction - commonsense reasoning procedures, methods, protocols - and the moral accountability of action, both of which also bear upon the realization of any practice. Two such traditions arise from the work of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel's classical ethnomethodology. Yet another theoretical lens for critical studies of practice arises from the work of Foucault where, for example, a relational conceptualization of power/knowledge illuminates such 'effects' as gendered workplace practices.

These and other studies also suggest that practice-focused empirical research needs to draw upon anthropological-ethnographic and sociological-participant observer methodologies for accessing and generating data. These enable researchers to get 'close to where the (inter)action is', thereby seeing human beings in 'real-time' as they instantiate a practice. This is the route for understanding ''organization as it happens'' (to paraphrase Boden ). Such an approach suggests that it is only through intimate observation that we can access organizational members' situated use and collective manipulation of an array of tools, technologies, objects, vocabularies, and complex bodies of knowledge in realizing a 'practice'. It is an approach that seeks to ground theorizing in what it is that people actually do, rather than beginning with theories abstracted from action. In this, it takes as its point of departure - at times explicitly and consciously, at times by implication - a phenomenological emphasis on lived experience, a hermeneutic emphasis on meanings embedded in linguistic, physical, and action artifacts working symbolically, and/or a critical theoretical emphasis on power.

This Workshop provides an opportunity for prospective participants to elaborate on a variety of theoretical and methodological questions concerning the character and study of practice, social realities, knowledge, and learning in the context of organizations. In this light, we propose the following as starting points on the theoretical front:

* What similarities or differences exist between or among theories and concepts of practice? How do they inform empirical studies, and what do they enable or constrain in such research?

* What particular elements of practice are important for the study of organizational actions? How might key practice-related phenomena such as knowledge, skill, rule, tools, and technologies be understood?

* How do various theories of practice account for stability and the maintenance of order, on the one hand, and change, on the other?

* How do we account for power and politics in realizing a practice or understand phenomena such as gendered practices? How do we account for the emotional and moral aspects which infuse practice?

* How are practices learned? What might be the role of reflection therein?

Also crucial for developing our understanding of these issues and phenomena are empirical studies which embrace the fluid, embodied, and collective efforts of organizational actors engaged in performing a 'practice'. We take the following questions as starting points on this topic:

* What methodological presuppositions do we make and what methods are called into play to enable the study of the rich complexity of practice being 'done' in real time, including its mix of knowledge, skills and artifacts and its organization across time and space?

* How can we access and study the embodied and tacit dimensions of practices, or other aspects of organizational life such as moralities/ethics, emotions, and aesthetics?

* What is the role of the researcher in the study of practices (e.g., observer, participant in dialogue, change agent)? How does that role anchor our own practices in 'doing research'?

This 'practice turn' also has implications for wider debates concerning, for instance, what constitutes 'effective' practice and how, if at all, it can be taught or transferred from one setting to another. Here, we start with these questions:

* To what extent can practice-focused research establish generalizable, normative claims for specific practices deemed to enhance organizational effectiveness? Can such identified local practices be transferred to other places or organizations, and if so, what kind of learning does such transfer call for?

* What are the implications of practice-based theorizing for pedagogy and management education?

* What are the implications of the 'practice turn' for theorizing organizational studies or even social theory and epistemology more broadly?

We welcome both theoretical and methodological papers elaborating one or several of these questions. We also seek papers that draw on empirical research and creatively combine theorizing and innovative research methods to develop our understandings of practice and of organization as it happens.

Submissions Interested participants must submit to the Editor-in-Chief (OSeditoralba.edu.gr) an abstract of no more than 1000 words for their proposed contribution plus a brief biographical note by January 31st, 2006. The submission must be made via email and it must be a Word attachment. It should contain authors' names, institutional affiliations, and email and postal addresses, while the subject matter line of the email should indicate the title of the Workshop. Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by February 28th, 2006. Papers should be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief by May 15th, 2006 and will be electronically circulated to all participants prior to the workshop.
Message 2: Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives

The ever-increasing accessibility of corpus data and the wider application of experimental linguistic techniques in recent years has led to a remarkable revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular. Consensus is growing that all sorts of data, even so-called primary data from introspection or from authentic language production, are inherently complex and reflect performance and production factors as well as the constructs which are subject of linguistic theory. It is therefore necessary for linguistic studies to adduce evidence from multiple data types or sources: introspective data, corpus data, psycholinguistic data, experimental data, historical and diachronic data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not only welcome but also often essential. It is in particular by contrasting evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual relationship and relative weight on the other.

It is the aim of this conference to bring together researchers from different areas of linguistics to discuss their views on the above issues and their use of different types of evidence in dealing with linguistic research questions of different generality, and thereby help establish a better understanding of the nature of linguistic evidence. We therefore invite original contributions from all fields of linguistics (including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, morphology, phonetics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, historical linguistics, typology) on any of the above issues concerning linguistic evidence.